The Administrative Housing Tribunal (TAL) has rejected several requests for housing repossessions deemed in bad faith since the beginning of the year in Montreal neighborhoods where rents are at the same time rising sharply, noted The duty. Lawyers are urging Quebec to crack down harder on landlords applying such tactics to apartments for speculative purposes.
In one year, the average rent for long-term rental units on Kijiji has climbed more than 13% on the island of Montreal, found The duty by compiling tens of thousands of apartment advertisements published on this platform between 1er April and the 1er June for the years 2022 and 2023.
Some Montreal neighborhoods stand out all the more for their bubbling rental market. Thus, in the reference district of Lorimier, in the Plateau-Mont-Royal, the average rent for a 3 and a half has increased by 32% in one year, shows our compilation. This increase reached 34% for the same type of apartment in Cartierville and 35% for 4 and a half apartments located in the Guybourg sector, in Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.
For the purposes of this report, The duty reviewed some thirty decisions rendered by the TAL in recent months concerning housing located in Montreal boroughs where significant rent increases have been noted. Among these decisions, requests for housing repossessions abound, some of which were rejected by the TAL, which judged them to be in bad faith, for the benefit of the tenants. However, these are exceptions, point out several housing lawyers.
“There are many tenants who say to themselves that it is not worth it and who will give up along the way”, instead of contesting a repossession of their accommodation, notes lawyer Alexandre B. Romano. Landlords get rid of their tenants and then re-let the vacated housing at a high price, which contributes to the “housing crisis”, adds lawyer Kimmyanne Brown.
Denied requests
Lise Meloche, for her part, decided to fight. She also won her case earlier this year against her landlord, who had tried to force her to leave the 3 and a half in Plateau-Mont-Royal where she has lived since 2006. Her rent is $690 per month.
In May 2022, the building where she occupies an apartment is bought by a new owner, who then tries to convince the tenant to leave the premises in exchange for financial compensation of $10,000, an amount that Ms.me Meloche refuses.
“I said to myself: $10,000 is good for a year, but what do I do next? Am I going to get myself a tent and sleep in La Fontaine Park? says the 65-year-old woman, who fears she won’t be able to afford to live in Montreal if she ever has to move.
The owner, Craig Herman, thus argued before the TAL that he wanted to take over this accommodation to accommodate his 22-year-old son, as permitted by law. However, Mr. Herman has acquired several properties in recent years intended to be resold in the following months, found the TAL. “It is difficult to believe, when he is currently in the process of selling a building purchased almost six months ago, that he intends to do differently this time,” said administrative judge Camille Champeval, who rejected the owner’s request for repossession of housing, in a decision rendered on April 14.
Lise Meloche, who claims to have experienced enormous stress during this legal saga, continues for her part to fear for her right to remain in the premises.
Tenants Claude St-Pierre and Patrick Gagnon, for their part, obtained nearly $24,000 in moral and punitive damages at the start of the year after suing their landlord, whom they suspected of having repossessed their dwelling in bad faith. summer 2020. They were paying $590 per month for their apartment located in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, where they had been living for 16 years.
The owner, who had just acquired this building a few months earlier, had argued that he intended to carry out major renovations in this accommodation and then live there with his close relatives. However, the tenants demonstrated before the administrative judge Francine Jodoin that after their departure for a residence for the elderly located in Pointe-aux-Trembles, the owner “never carried out any major work in the building and that ‘he rented the accommodation again’, where he did not move. The TAL thus condemned the owner – who owns several buildings in Montreal – to offer significant financial compensation to his former tenants for having uprooted them from the borough where they had lived for decades without valid reason according to the law.
Exploding demands
TAL’s annual reports for the past six years show a steady increase in housing repossession claims that end up in court. These relate to repossessions that are refused by tenants. The owner must then obtain authorization from the TAL. The number of housing repossession requests made by landlords before this court thus reached 2,540 in one year, between 2021 and 2022, a record unmatched for more than a decade, noted The duty.
“There should be more restrictions in the law on repossessing housing so that repossessing an apartment is much more difficult to obtain than it is currently”, notes the lawyer. housing Ernesto Motta. The latter represented last year a tenant from Mercier–Hochelaga, Francis Gauthier, who successfully convinced the TAL to refuse a request for repossession of his dwelling by the owner’s son, then 11 years old. His rent is $830 per month.
“The goal for me is to be able to accommodate my children upstairs [où demeure le locataire] so that we stop being piled up on top of each other,” says owner Jean-François Boivin. “We are enduring this for the moment because we have other priorities”, adds Mr. Boivin, who however intends to make a new request for recovery for this accommodation, “eventually”.
To apply the law
Article 1970 of the Civil Code of Quebec provides that a dwelling “which has been repossessed or evicted cannot be rented or used for a purpose other than that for which the right was exercised, without the permission of the court”. If applicable, the TAL sets the rent. However, this rule is rarely applied in practice, and the fines provided for offenders – at most $1,225 for an individual – are derisory, deplores lawyer Kimmyanne Brown.
“Any comments aimed at changing the law must be submitted to the legislators,” said the Duty TAL spokesperson Denis Miron.
The office of the minister responsible for housing, France-Élaine Duranceau, did not want to comment on this file.
With Laurianne Croteau and Alex Fontaine